I ran into an issue where I mapped a few network drives on Windows 8, and when I was using an application as administrator, they wouldn’t appear in the file browser. Apparently this is because drives mapped as user X are not available to other uses (even the administrator). Strange.

Anyway, there is a policy registry key called “EnableLinkedConnections” that will enable the mapped drives to appear when running applications as an administrator. Use this reg file or see below.

If you’ve had troubles joining your Windows 8 machine to a Linux-hosted Samba domain, and it worked in previous versions of Windows, there may be a simple fix. Try using this reg file or edit the key noted below

I’ve been testing out the new Windows 8 (x64). So far so good except today, I constantly received the blue screen of death (BSOD) stating “driver_irql_not_less_or_equal” with NDIS.sys as the culprit. I did a bit of searching – many forums indicated that my network card drivers were the issue. I decided to uninstall programs 1-by-1. It turns out, Avast antivirus was the problem. As soon as Avast was uninstalled, I haven’t had a BSOD since.

Edit:

This post has got a lot of search hits. If you don’t have Avast installed and are still having this problem, check out this link. If you have neither Avast nor a Realtek network card, you might have to do a bit more hunting for the problem. I suggest using my method and uninstalling applications one at a time to see what is causing the problem. With Windows 8 being new, there may be bugs in some of the drivers.

Edit2:

Received a response from Avast.

Hello,

This issue is currently being investigated by our development team, it is probably caused by a bug in the latest version of avast! antivirus in combination with some third party network drivers. Once the fix is available, it will be released through the regular program update.

The common symptoms are frequent or random stop errors (bugchecks or BSODs) referencing mainly ndis.sys or aswnet.sys drivers. The issue affects only Windows 8 computers, probably only with the General Availability Cumulative Update (KB2756872 – Windows 8 RTM to GDR update) installed or the General Distribution Release (GDR) versions of this operating system.

I found an old project on github called thingiview. It can take (among other things) an STL file (exportable from SolidWorks and other CAD programs) and render it using canvas/WebGL (pretty much only works in Chrome). It is based off of the Three.js project. thingiview uses an outdated (R32) version of Three.js (currently R50) because the project seemed to have died off about 2 years ago.

Anyway, I wanted to render large, complex CAD models in the browser, mostly for experimentation. One example we have, exported from SolidWorks in coarse mode, has approximately 350,000 vertices. The way the code was written for thingiview, the STL to JSON rendering in PHP would bog down to an unsuable speed at even 50-100,000 vertices. As-is, I left the converter running for about 14 hours with our complex model, and it still didn’t finish.

I decided to rewrite portions of the code to make it more efficient for my use, so I forked it. My first commit was to make huge improvements on the efficiency of STL (binary) to JSON conversion. Now, the complex model takes a mere 30 seconds to render. Most of the previous inefficiencies were due to the calling of in_array and array_search (x3) for every vertex. As the number of vertices grew, the slower each call to in_array and array_search became. Using a hashmap (storing the contents into an array keyed by MD5 hashes of the contents), I’m able to avoid searching the array, massively improving execution time.

One day, I may take the time to update the project to the latest Three.js (a lot of the JS function calls are deprecated) and/or take a look at improving the other conversions. For now, this will satisfy my SolidWorks to interactive web model cravings.